New Report: The (Mostly Republican) Politics Of The Trillion Dollar S&P 500 Index Fund Market

MADISON, Wis., Feb. 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Do you know the politics of the companies in your investment and retirement portfolios? Most people don't because the information is not readily available. Mutual funds and exchange traded funds typically include dozens of company stocks, so figuring out the political impact of your retirement and investment money is extremely difficult.

And that is something Goods Unite Us, a Madison-based app and website company that sheds light on corporate money in politics, wants to change. If individuals care about being socially and politically conscious, which companies they invest in matters -- a lot.

That's why the team at Goods Unite Us spent the last few months analyzing the politics of one of the most common retirement and investment portfolio products out there: S&P 500 index funds. As their name implies, these funds include about 500 of the largest publicly-traded companies' stocks.

The top three S&P 500 index funds have over $1.15 trillion dollars of people's hard-earned money invested into them. (If you have a retirement or investment portfolio, you almost definitely own one of these funds.)

WHAT ARE THE POLITICS OF THE TOP THREE S&P 500 INDEX FUNDS?

Key takeaways:

• In total, the companies whose stock are included in these three funds and their senior executives have given over $1 billion dollars to politicians and PACs during the last four federal election cycles.
• Approximately 55% of the companies in these funds donate more to Republicans than to Democrats. Meanwhile, only 29% give more to Democrats than Republicans.
• Using each fund's company weightings, we estimate that a $10,000 investment into one of these funds would effectively buy about $4,000 dollars-worth of stock in Republican companies.
• In the top three S&P 500 funds alone about $460 billion dollars is invested into Republican companies. While it's impossible to know exactly how much of that $460 billion dollars came from people that identify as Democrats, we estimate it to be more than $100 billion dollars.

The funds analyzed were:

• Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF, which has over $615 billion dollars invested in it;
• SPDR's S&P 500 ETF Trust, which has over $320 billion dollars invested in it; and
• iShares' Core S&P 500 ETF, which has over $230 billion dollars invested in it.

You can access our full report by going here.

SOURCE Goods Unite Us